5 Chores You Wish Kids Would Gladly Do

These and other tips will prove futile in convincing them to do chores.

1. Fold clothes. Seems like kids would love folding clothes: clean clothes smell good, they’re familiar, and the kids get to make geometric shapes. But the only reason they’d be amenable to folding the clothes is so they can throw them in the air and unfold them again.

2. Pick up after selves. It is only logical that if one drops something, one should pick it up. Alas, kids don’t seem understand this concept. Then again, neither do some dog-walking neighbors.

4. Make own lunch. Seems like they never seem to want to eat what you pack them, but instead of making their own lunches, they’d prefer you partake in a guessing game in which your every answer winds up in the compost bin.

5. Take out the garbage. Somehow the connection between the kitchen trash and the garbage that gets picked up every week outside on the curb is lost in translation. They say that kids learn “foreign” languages best at a very young age … keep trying.

Once the kids see how smooth the house runs with their help, it’ll be easy to get them doing chores. And if that fails, try bribery.